Happy Days Blog (The New York Times)

We don't find the treasures that lie right in front of our eyes until we fully understand what is it that we are looking for. The Happy Days Blog in the NY Times is one such example. Although I have been reading the Times for a long time now, I did not realize that it has a blog dedicated to finding happiness!

I serendipitously found an article titled The Joy of Less by Pico Iyer, which I liked a lot. In it Iyer talks about finding happiness by letting go of all materialistic things, almost to the extent of turning into a monk.

Then a few days later I read Daniel Goldman's interview with "the happiest man in the world," -- a tibetan monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In the article, Goldman talks about both eastern and western practices and tools for seeking happiness and refers to a researcher's finding that people are happy when they are “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.” This theory of working towards a goal seems to be essential for finding happiness. Today, in the corporate world, we are encouraged to have Specific, Measurable, Ambitious Realistic and Time-bound (S.M.A.R.T) goals to work towards. I have always wondered why people talked about work as being essential for happiness, until this statement about goal-directed living suddenly seemed to explain it.

As I continued to browse the Times after reading this piece, I realized that both Pico Iyer and Daniel Goldman are contributors to the blog on happiness. The introduction to the blog resonates very much with the theme of this blog --

"The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead."

I realized almost immediately that I had found my treasure trove. I promptly bookmarked the link to the page and encourage you to do so as well.